This was a brilliantly tense finale to what has been a subtly compelling and breathlessly claustrophobic series. As the snow turned to sludge, the roads reopened and the ferry was allowed on its way at last, the sordid plottings of the town’s triad came to light. And with them, the fabric of this isolated community – superficially tight-knit but actually sheet-thin – began to melt. Families disintegrated, affairs were laid bare and years-old abuse cases, covered up by the powers-that-be, were finally unearthed.

“This was just a sleepy town,” says Hinrika, confronting Guðni as he desperately tries to flee to the Faroe Islands. And so it was – if, that is, you weren’t one of the town’s rotten fish, frantically wheeling, dealing, setting up a company called Drengur, buying land around the fjord with a mind to sell it to Chinese contractors and staging murderous insurance fraud in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. No rest for the wicked and all that.

He's huge, he's hairy – and he's the hottest man in Iceland

Read more

There’s pathos in Hinrika’s disbelieving questions to Guðni, possibly the worst of the homegrown bad apples (Leifur seems less evil, though Hrafn certainly gives him a run for his money): “What happened here?” She cannot fathom the actions of this group of townsmen, motivated by greed to turn the corner of the world she and her stoner husband call home into a place where girls are sold into prostitution and little boys are threatened with knives. Am I the only one wishing they’d just arrested Guðni, Seyðisfjörður’s very own Paul Robinson, smarming his way around the local Lassiter’s, when he first turned up in that god-awful mustard jacket? Was that not incriminating enough?

With the town’s unravelling, we are treated to some gruellingly bleak confrontations. When Andri ploddingly hunts down his (not quite?) ex-father-in-law, having found the incriminating key in his jeans, damp with kerosene, there were no pyrotechnics. Eiríkur downs tools, descends the stairs and puts a pot of coffee on the stove. As he tells Andri how, in a cruel twist of fate, he was the one who signed off on the insurance claim that profited the very men responsible for the death of his daughter, a glassy tear is suspended in his eye, waiting patiently for its moment and falling only once it’s ready. It’s in the slowness of this scene that the drama lies; this is no high-octane showdown and it’s all the more mesmerising for it.

When Andri breaks the news to the rest of the family that Eiríkur was the one who popped Hrafn off, we watch from outside – through the window, almost as if into a dolls’ house – while Agnes clutches the walls. We hear not a peep of the exchange until she opens the window, steps outside and the sound of her mother running water from the tap penetrates the silence. The wordlessness makes the scene all the more heart-wrenching. The drama is swiftly brought back down to earth with the crushingly domestic: “Pack your bags … you can’t expect mum to keep cooking and cleaning for you.”

This series has, at times, been one of men butting heads, breaking glass and doing deals. Even now-gentle Andri is not guilt-free – his murkier past becomes clear in these final episodes, a past in which he made bad mistakes on a case and he and Trausti, the Reykjavik police city-slicker, came to debilitating blows. Agnes’s words back in episode seven were telling: “Trausti’s been in town for five minutes and you’re already behaving like an ogre.”

Trapped, unlikeliest TV hit of the year, draws to a close

Read more

This doesn’t sound like the Andri we’ve come to know and love (yes, love – I’m now a fully paid-up member of the fanclub). And here’s hoping that Andri’s “real me”, at home with “real detective work” – the fact he even uttered the words back in episode seven without sounding like a Dove advert was testament to Ólafsson’s acting – is something we will get to see more of in a second season.

Of course, a few of the women are wrong’uns too, and many of the men aren’t. But a disproportionate number of women in Trapped do seem to have fallen victim to the power plays – the trafficking and the beatings – of male characters, whether it’s Joy and her sister to the machinations of “the Lithuanian”, the Faroe Islander Dvalin Knudsson and Guðni. Or poor meek María, raped then forced to keep quiet about it so the fish factory gang – Leifur (her father!), Hrafn and Guðni – could hold the possibility of a rape charge over Geirmundur’s head to get him to burn the factory down before skipping town. It hardly seems fair that María is taken away in handcuffs for killing her former rapist in self-defence. But then that is part of the emotional clout of Trapped – some of the handcuffed characters feel, if not more sinned against than sinning, certainly propelled to commit criminal acts through first being victims themselves.

In the closing scenes, as Andri barrels down the road – left alone by his old family, his wedding ring newly removed from his finger – there is no great redemption. As the town returns to business (sort of) as usual, it is nice to see Hjörtur reinstalled into one of the town’s few remaining cosy folds, and Joy and her sister going for a wintery harbourside stroll with Bárður. But, brilliantly, this glimmer of catharsis is by no means universal; there is no such comfort for the most innocent of characters – poor, sweet, flame-haired Maggi no longer even wants his red firetruck.

Still, at least we did get something we’d all been waiting for: Andri finally zipping his coat up. He waited till he was in a deep freeze with icicles forming in his luxuriant beard, but there it was, zipped.